Hoy he terminado de recablear los K701 y de ponerles un conector DIN de cuatro vías, los he conectado al Beta22 y me he sorprendido con lo bien que suenan. He querido ver otras opiniones sobre la pareja Beta/K701 y he buscado en la red. Curiosamente, me he encontrado con la parrafada siguiente en diyAudio que no me resisto a poner porque expone de manera sencilla las decisiones que he tomado para mi Beta 22 y que yo no sabría explicar mejor.
You are obviously not ignorant, but in my opinion you have overlooked something here. The problem with head-fi is 'flavour-of-the-month' and 'enthusiastic fan-boy' syndrome. People are enthusiastic, which is fine, but then in their enthusiasm they go on about things they don't fully understand and state sentiment as if is fact. This applies squarely to active-ground (3 channel) and bridge-tied-load (4 channel) Beta 22 headphone amplifiers.
The whole bridge-tied-load thing (often wrongly labeled 'balanced') is just misguided with headphone amplifiers. People often change many things at once and then automatically attribute any perceived improvement to a 'balanced amplifier' without knowing where the perceived improvement actually came from.
The best possible performance will happen when the following are done together...
1. Headphones are re-wired to split the grounds of the left and right channels. This always requires re-termination and sometimes requires re-cabling of the headphones. [This is often wrongly labeled as 'balanced'].
2. Separate ground connections provided on the amplifier. This is typically possible with 1 x 4 pole XLR or 2 x 3 pole XLR.
3. The amplifier is internally configured with separate low impedance left and right wire runs from the ground connections on output connectors directly back to the main power supply 'star' point.
4. The amplifier has 2 channel (un-balanced) active circuits, ideally with separate voltage regulators for the left and right channels.
5. The amplifier has a volume control that has very tight matching of the left / right sections.
No amp channel 'balancing', no bridge-tied-load, no active ground, etc., etc..
(If you need an actual balanced input from your source, use a transformer from Sowter, Jensen, etc., to convert balanced to un-balanced at the input).
I am sure this will confuse some head-fi lurkers here (hello boys and girls) who have been force-fed a diet of 'it must be balanced'. My only intent is to help, so hopefully this will encourage some to stop and question the marketing and over-hyped blurb. Maybe some will be encouraged to build optimally wired split-ground 2 channel Beta 22 amps (with matching split-ground headphones). You will not be able to join the enthusiastic "I've got a maxed out 6 channel blah, blah, blah" gang, but you will be able to relax and enjoy the best possible performance.
